It Takes People to Make PLM Work

By David Prawel

It’s hard to imagine there’s anyone in manufacturing who hasn’t heard the drumbeat of PLM. MCAD vendors worldwide trumpet the virtue and value of their PLM software and the productivity and profit enabled by their PLM vision. Weekly articles tout the power of PLM and Lean principles in steering a path toward higher-quality products, faster time to market, and innovation.

PLM is an intriguing vision indeed. But for all the millions spent, it remains just that for most of the organizations who ventured forth. Though we have technology that can do all sorts of amazing things in design, analysis, manufacturing, and all other aspects of the product lifecycle, successful PLM remains elusive. Not only are the product development processes extremely complex, but successful PLM depends in large part on effective communication and collaboration, which is proving fundamentally more difficult than the technology.

Effective collaboration is one of the keys to winning in the business of manufacturing and innovation. Numerous studies have detailed many good reasons to collaborate, and the huge — often hidden — cost of doing it poorly.

>> In the end, PLM is all about people, driving processes, supported by technology.

In organization after organization that I visit,  the same problem is clear. Despite huge investments in technology by very smart technologists, fundamental changes in manufacturing business processes won’t happen unless the people involved change the way they view the world. Successful PLM implementation depends on defining and standardizing common processes and workflows across the enterprise. In the end, PLM is all about people, driving processes, supported by technology. Most companies have it backward — acquiring technology, fitting processes around its capabilities, and then making people use it.

People operate differently — especially engineers. A company and its people have a culture, often one of its greatest assets, which often needs to adapt to new collaborative processes and technologies or risk failure. In their excellent 1999 book, Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture, Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn report that as many as three-quarters of reengineering, TQM, and strategic planning efforts fail or create problems that could kill their companies. The most frequently cited reason: neglecting the organization’s culture.

People also look to leaders of internal “herds”  for guidance and adoption of new ideas before enlisting themselves. In More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places, Michael Mauboussin, an adjunct professor at ColumbiaUniversity and chief investment strategist at Legg Mason, discusses the herd mentality of complex adaptive systems, such as teams of product developers. He shows that certain conditions must be in place to engender change or have an effect on such groups, and that if any of these factors is violated, the result is inefficiency, failure of the system, increased risk, and decreased quality.

Change is inevitable. It is intrinsic to nearly every business process, and indeed to innovation itself. As designers and engineers try new ideas, success depends on their ability to make changes quickly and flawlessly, craft processes to manage them, and implement technology to support them.

If we can make this happen, PLM has a chance. But it’s tough stuff. Even Charles Darwin knew this when he said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” I wonder what he would have thought about PLM.

David Prawel has spent 25 years in the manufacturing software business and is founder, president, and principal consultant at Longview Advisors Inc. Send e-mail about this article to [email protected].